Gene expression is a stochastic process. Random expression bursts cause tremendous
cell-to-cell variations in mRNA and protein levels. The consequences are beneficial in
some instances, e.g., in cell differentiation, and harmful in others, e.g., in bacterial drug
tolerance. A key interest in biology is therefore to decipher the kinetics behind this noise.
What is the distribution of transcription rates in a cell population? Are gene expression
dynamics heritable? Do gene networks communicate via the ‘Morse code’ of expression
burst? Detailed answers to these questions are pending due to insufficient methods to
temporally resolve gene expression noise at single-molecule resolution.

DYNOME is our answer to this challenge.

DYNOME combines super–resolution particle tracking, multi–color barcoding, lineage
tracking, and lab–on–a–chip bioreactors in one innovative bio–dynamics platform to
monitor gene expression at the single–molecule level for many genes in single cells over
many generations. Decrypting cell–individuality with kinetic models will be a
breakthrough both in basic and in applied sciences with impacts on the development of
drugs against bacterial invasions, the design of new and useful functionalities in cells,
and on our understanding of how biological variability arises from the laws of statistical
physics.